TURNING POINT.

The Face Of Abuse

A Photographer Focuses Upon An Uncivil War At Home

April 18, 1993|By Linda Lehrer.

Donna Ferrato's education was just getting started when she left college in the early 1970s and, with a camera as her teacher, traveled around Europe and America pursuing her interest in "living and understanding people."

Working at odd jobs, often exchanging her pictures for food and lodging, Ferrato photographed the French and their bread in Paris, old men in Belgium and dogs riding in pickup trucks in Colorado.

The camera was her way to learn about people, to go into their lives. But not until the 1980s, while on assignment to do a photo story about love in the '80s, did Ferrato's interest in observing and understanding people develop into a passion. She now takes photographs that no one wants to see.

They also are not easy to forget. Pictures of women with black eyes, with bruises and with stab wounds. Pictures of frightened, crying children. Ferrato's photos show the horror of the battlefield.

But the war she is covering is in American homes. The wounded are the victims of domestic violence.

Ferrato, 42, insists that she "did not come to photography with a mission or a purpose as a photojournalist. With the camera . . . no one paid attention to me. It was easy for me to be there, sometimes with the camera, sometimes just listening and talking."

The camera that gave Ferrato her sought-after anonymity was also what set her apart from rebellious youths of her generation.

"I didn't want to be in school; I was angry at what was happening with the war and with civil rights," said Ferrato, who was somewhat adrift in the late '60s and early '70s. After a few years of college and a brief marriage, Ferrato moved around, working a variety of jobs.

In 1976 she moved to Europe, looking for work and taking pictures.

"I lived very cheaply," she said. "I slept on park benches and lived off the kindness of other people. In return I would do something for them. Very often, pictures were my way of giving back. I was learning a great deal. I didn't have to worry about making editors happy. All I had to do was survive. And the camera helped me. It taught me everything about how to survive."

Ferrato returned to the United States with her pictures in 1978.

By the following year Ferrato had picked up occasional assignments from various publications. An assignment from New York magazine took her to one of the city's infamous sex clubs, Plato's Retreat, to photograph the owner, Larry Levinson.

Levinson invited her to look around, and there Ferrato encountered Lisa and Garth, the couple who inadvertently changed her life. Ferrato recalls being fascinated by Lisa and Garth, who seemed to reign over the wild scene at Plato's Retreat like "the king and queen."

"They would talk and socialize," she said, "but they were not swinging like the others, wildly out of control. They told me they had three kids together and that she had two daughters from a previous marriage. He said he admired her so much and that she was still trying to find herself sexually. He was trying to expose her to all those things."

Her talks with Lisa and Garth led Ferrato to propose a photo story about love in the '80s, chronicling the lives of sexually liberated couples. The Japanese edition of Playboy was interested in the idea, and Ferrato began spending time with Lisa and Garth, including weekends at their home in a wealthy suburb of New York, photographing them. She discovered that Lisa's freedom was an illusion; she was a possession and a creation of Garth's. The extent of his control over his wife was revealed to Ferrato one night when, awakened by yelling, she found Garth chasing Lisa from room to room.

Grabbing her camera, Ferrato followed them into the bathroom, where she saw Garth hit his wife.

"The first time was such a shock to me," said Ferrato, who has a photo of the incident in her book, with herself taking the picture reflected in the bathroom mirror.

"When he went to hit her again, I grabbed his arm and asked what he was going to do to her, telling him that he was going to hurt her," Ferrato said.

"His words really chilled me. He said, `She's my wife, I know my own strength and you stay out of it. I'm going to teach her a lesson.' "

Shaken by what she saw, Ferrato said, she didn't want to continue with the story, to see Garth and Lisa any more or to develop the film. But she needed to understand what had happened. So she went back to talk with them and found Lisa with a newly blackened eye. At the time, she said, Garth denied what he had done, and not until much later did Lisa acknowledge that the battering had been going on for some time.

After almost 10 years of educating herself about domestic violence, chronicling its effects on families and trying to persuade magazine editors and book publishers to let her tell this story with her photos, Ferrato found a publisher for "Living With the Enemy" (Aperture, 1991, $24.95). The book depicts the lives of women who have endured abuse at the hands of their husbands and lovers.